Constant Companion
by PlayPrayDie
Summary: James Moriarty has never gotten on well with cracks.
1. Logic Failure

James Moriarty has never gotten on very well with cracks.

It wasn't the first odd tic that Sebastian realized he had, nor was it the last. At first he just tried to brush it off as _James being James_ and leave it at that. Jim just _did stuff like that_- obsessive stuff, compulsive stuff, sometimes even _obsessive compulsive_ stuff, all _irritating_ stuff none the less, but he was enough of a broken idiot savant that his brilliance made up for his _glaringly_ faulty manufacturing.

Sometimes, Sebastian wondered if James Moriarty came with a fucking warranty.

He _did_ do some strange things, no two ways about it. Whenever they were in restaurants, he would take the salt and pepper shakers and turn them so they were 'facing away from him'. Sebastian had never asked how he had arbitrarily decided which side was the 'front', and whether or not maybe he had gotten it wrong _just one time_, so that instead they were both facing towards him, but it was just _one of those things Jim did_, and it was rediculous to expect an answer that made any sort of logical sense out of his mental chaos, and so Sebastian had bit down on his question and ignored it, even though he did it _every single time they were in a bloody restaurant_ and it did get kind of annoying sometimes.

And then there was his thing about statues. He flat-out didn't like them. Sebastian had gathered up the patience to ask _why_, and Jim had just muttered something about them being 'shifty' and then walked off, keeping one eye on the stone statue in the middle of the courtyard like it was liable to do something unexpected. This one Sebastian could have _almost_ understood- _almost_, because a statue was a _brilliant_ disguise, a hiding place in plain sight, and it would be a brilliant idea to take a statue in the middle of the night and then replace it and impersonate it, waiting for the right moment to kill someone and then going back to stillness. So he could understand it to a point. Except then, it ought to have been _all statues_ that bothered James, and it _wasn't_- there were specific criteria for which statues he found 'shifty'. Metal ones were fine. Clay ones weren't bad at all. _Just_ stone. That didn't make much sense to Sebastian, but by then, he had run out of the patience to ask, so he hadn't.

That and penlights. _This_ one Sebastian just didn't even ask about, mostly because Jim didn't like being thought of as having weaknesses, and that's what it was. A _weakness_ for penlights. He damn well collected them- he thought Sebastian hadn't noticed, of course, but there was a stash of penlights nearly everywhere he went. They wound up under pillows, in cabinets, behind bookcases- anywhere you could fit one. Just _everywhere_. He bought them, stole them, _made_ them by hand- any time a penlight _might_ become involved, it _had_ to be his. Sebastian hadn't pointed it out. Jim just went about his daily business with three or four penlights tucked into his pockets. This one didn't make any more sense than the others.

But it was _cracks_ that really took the cake. Cracks in things- bookcovers, wooden shelves, priceless vases, the casings of explosives- they drove him so utterly _to ruin_ that it was funny, at first, and then kind of alarming later. Because Sebastian had known he was nuts, before- utterly bonkers- but Jim had always made insanity seem _affable_ and _charming_ and almost _endearing_ in its own way, in-between being slightly annoying. But all of his other compulsive behavior was always kind of cheerfully played down as being just _James being James_.

Not this.

Sebastian had just noticed little things at first. That he wouldn't step on cracks in the sidewalk. He had thought at first that it was just because of the little children's rhyme about _break your mother's back_, because James took little children's rhymes and stories and things _disturbingly seriously_ sometimes. There was something terribly odd about a grown man- even a madman like Moriarty- reading a children's book over a cup of tea, and finishing it, and setting it down and beginning to talk about it as though it was the most dryly fascinating piece of historically accurate high literature he had ever read. Like the stories about mad old wizards and plucky young adventurers were actually _biographies_. But that was still something he did that fell into the _affable and charming_ category of madness, so Sebastian shrugged it off, but none the less he had considered it a possibility when he saw Jim deftly skipping the cracks in the street without looking at them.

But then, he had realized that Jim's mom was _missing and presumed dead_ and even if she hadn't been, he most _certainly_ wouldn't have gone out of his way to spare her any sort of torture on _his_ behalf, not even something as small as changing the way he walked in order to save her from a painful injury, paralysis, and potentially slow death. No, there was something more to it, but Sebastian couldn't for the life of him figure out what it was.

He had started paying attention, after that. Paying attention to Jim, to the _cracks_, and he realized that the man would walk halfway across a room just to turn a book towards the wall if its cover had a dry crack in the leather binding, and he would do the same with priceless ming vases and even historical relics- twist them around to face the wall, even _dispatchig their security measures just to do it_, sometimes- and Sebastian had just laughed it off as _dear god, another quirk? How am I expected to keep up?_

But then the day had come that they had been staying in a hotel. A nice one, with a luxury suite, and a spa, and clean comfortable beds, and a gorgeous view.

There had been a crack in the inner wall of the closet.

James had _snapped_.

It hadn't been bothering him, it hadn't even been really _visible_, but Jim had _flipped out_, and accused the hospital staff of quite a few things that didn't really make a lot of sense at the time, and they had tried to offer their 'displeased customer' a better deal, but those were their last set of rooms so they couldn't upgrade, and they were all really rather sorry about that.

Jim had left. He hadn't stayed, he hadn't taken the better deal, he had just grabbed his stuff and gotten the hell out of there. Sebastian had come with him because _that was what he did_, through hell or high water, even though they wound up in a little sandy brown hotel off of the main highway and it wasn't anywhere near as nice, but at least there _hadn't been any cracks in the walls._

It hadn't been just a weakness or a compulsion. It was a _phobia_. The biggest _NO_ that Sebastian had ever seen out of James, an absolute refusal for compromise, even when it turned out better for him in the end. He just _couldn't do it_.

He had asked. Just once. He had asked why.

And Jim had just given him this _look_.

This _look_ like he had just asked _why he was uncomfortable sleeping with an armed nuclear weapon in the bed with him_.

Sebastian hadn't asked again. But he had thought. He had wondered, and watched, and _thought_. And in the end, in a rare, priceless moment of _being able to understand James Moriarty_, he had come to the conclusion that Jim must have hated cracks because his world was _so fractured, so shattered _already as it was_, _that a crack in the surface of reality seemed like the universe taunting him, a string to be pulled on and _everything _would unravel because there being a crack meant there was _something _on the **_other side _**of that crack, and if he pushed- if he allowed his brilliant, genius mind to push on that mystery just a little too hard, then **_everything _**would collapse because what was on the other side might actually come through, and bring the whole world to ashes along with it.

Sebastian couldn't possibly know exactly how _right_ he really was.


	2. Failure

He wants him back.

He wants him back more than anything else in the whole world because he was _The Doctor_, that mad, brilliant, _glorious_ man who burned like the surface of a sun. Whenever Jimmy had told him that, back when he was little- when he was just a little tyke- it had made The Doctor _smile_ that little sad smile, but that was okay, because a sad smile was the only kind of _real_ smile in all the world that suited that face. Because bouncing around and grinning like a madman was all _lies_- beautiful lies, as beautiful as _any_ lie could _ever_ be, but still lies none the less. Those sad smiles were the only truthful ones that Jimmy could ever get out of him.

He had been Mori back then. _Mori_. He never let anyone else use that name. _The Doctor_ was the only one who could call him that. He was _Moriarty_ or _James_ or _Jimmy_ or _Jim_, but never _Mori_.

Moriarty. The Doctor had heard his name and thought it was _brilliant_ and called him _death_ and smiled that little sad smile that was so _utterly honest and real_, and he would tease Jim... no, maybe not Jim, maybe _himself_... by calling him his _constant companion_. Back then, little Jimmy hadn't understood what that meant. Not back then when death was so commonplace around The Doctor. Not back before he learned that _normal people_ thought death was a tragedy, instead of a given.

He wants his Doctor back. He _needs_ his Doctor back. Because his Doctor _understands_, and he _gets it_, and he's _never_ boring- he'll never be boring- he's the sheer _anthithesis_ of boring. Not like any of the other doctors. Any of the ones with their boring little _simple minds_ and their _simple thoughts_ and their _simple lives_. They had wasted so much money trying to send him to other doctors, trying to convince him that his Doctor hadn't been real. Other doctors who tried to replace _his_ Doctor. The fools.

And he tried. He tried _so damn fucking hard_ to make his Doctor so _proud_, so proud it _hurts_, in the same way that Jim hurts when he misses him, so hard it makes him want to rip his heart out and serve it up on a platter, to give it to him, to give him anything- to give him _everything_- to make him oh so _proud_. Never happy. No, The Doctor wasn't _happy_. He didn't know how to be _happy_. He could be _brilliant_ or _terrifying_ or _fantastic_ or _amazing_, but never _happy_. So not happy, no. But just to make him _smile_ that little proud, sad smile, like _his constant companion_ had done something to prove there was worth left in the universe, worth left in his feeble little life, worth in _Jim_. And maybe if Jim proved himself worthy enough, his Doctor would _come back_, and _want him back again_, he he would take Jim away from this _painfully dreadfully boring place_ and let him become _Mori_ once more, and they could see the stars and _smile_ together, those little painful smiles that they both knew were lies, but they were perfect enough that it didn't _matter_ because neither one of them _cared_.

So he would do anything- absolutely _anything_- anything in the world... if it was just enough to make The Doctor see some kind of _worth_ in him again.

He would make himself _burn_, the same way The Doctor burned, hotter than the fires of hell, like the surface of the sun, like a star in_ brilliant supernova_. Beautiful and terrible and _dangerous_ all at once.

He would look everywhere. To every corner of this little world, with his fingers in every single pie and a leash on every single spider in this web, for even a _whisper_ of a tall, pale madman with a big blue box who ran around talking rubbish about Jammie Dodgers and bowties.

He would _tear this world apart_ if he had to. He would, and he _could_, and he nearly _had_ done it. _So_ many times before, he had nearly done it, nearly burned this planet to a shell of its former self, nearly _broke it_, just because he knew _that would bring The Doctor running_. And The Doctor would effortlessly track down the source of the disturbance, and then there they would be, standing across from eachother, and _he would finally have his Doctor back_.

And he would get down on his knees and _beg_ for forgiveness.

He would. He would beg to not be destroyed, to not be _crushed_, to not be thrown away or tossed aside or _left behind_ again. He would beg The Doctor with _every single honest word left inside of him that he hadn't yet suffocated in its sleep_, and The Doctor would _hear_ them and know them for what they were and he would forgive. He would _forgive_, because he was the Oncoming Storm, the Bringer of Darkness, the Trickster, the Destroyer of Worlds, and nothing that Jim had ever, _ever_ done had _ever_ been meant to hurt that glorious, terrible, _wonderful_ Doctor who had whisked him away all those long years ago and made him everything he had never dreamed in his wildest dreams he could even _hope_ to become.

The Doctor would forgive him. Because The Doctor was _kind_.

The Doctor would understand him. Because The Doctor was _clever_.

The Doctor would want him back. Because The Doctor was so, _so_ _lonely_.

And in the back of his mind, Jim hoped... no, _knew_. He _knew_ that The Doctor missed him as much as he missed The Doctor.

Because he was Death incarnate, and the only Doctor he would _ever_ need was The Lonely God.

And he _would_ make him proud.

No matter _what_ it took.


	3. Irrational Failure

The first time Mycroft ever heard about The Doctor, his first thought was, _how can I use this?_

That had been back when he was first involving himself in politics, back when he was still young and foolish and his brain was uncomfortably addled with hormones. He had stumbled across the sealed file while assisting a minor diplomat- Melissa 'just Mel is okay' Linden- to solve a dilemma in some form of financially-motivated scheme, and he had set it up to not only smooth out any problems, but also to funnel a meager sum into a certain untraceable account of his _own_ for each transaction that took place. Feeling rather good about himself, he had spied a folder that said '_top secret_' written across the top in big bold letters, and just _shuffled it into_ his own things as he collected his calculations and walked out of the building.

He hadn't known what was inside. He hadn't cared. All he knew back then was, if he knew a secret, then he had _leverage_, and he could _work_ leverage.

What he found within was _not_ anything _close_ to what he was expecting.

Torchwood. Unit. Christmas day. Blood. Mind control. Spaceship in the sky.

There had been one mention of The Doctor. Just _one_. Right down at the very bottom, it had mentioned that _The Doctor_ had been onboard.

At first, the way they phrased it in the report, it had seemed as though this unnamed _doctor_ had just been a man who specialized in xenopsychology or xenolinguistics or something, which was why he had known how to call the aliens bluff. He had thought that perhaps, if he could discover the withheld name of this _doctor_ and _leverage_ him properly, he would get a foothold in the so-called 'pseudoscience' corner of the political game which was becoming _more and more poignant_ as more and more alien attacks occurred. At the rate they had been going, there was no sign of any kind of _decline_, and far from it- these contacts seemed to be growing in frequency. So it would only be logical to go try and make '_friends'_ with this 'doctor'.

When he had dropped a reference to the file in casual conversation the next time he saw Melissa over tea, to congratulate one-another on a job well done, hoping she would let something slip, she had gone so pale and so silent that he might as well have told her that he had a bomb strapped to her three-year-old granddaughter.

She hadn't said a word. Not a _single word_ to him. No matter what he said, or bribed, or cajoled, or threatened, she _would not speak_. It was an entirely new thing to him, having to leave disappointed. He considered himself rather charming, when he wanted to be, and having someone just _shut down on him_ was something that had never happened before.

But after that sort of a reaction, he had filed away the search for this unknown doctor for another time, lest he break someone _else_ by accident, or pry too deeply into matters he ought not know about. Not _yet_, at least.

He filed it away and forgot about it for five years. Until he was well embroiled in politics. Until he was no longer just some pest of a teenager, embezzling funds from global pyramid schemes. Until he was really properly _someone_ in the grand sceme of things, and people _knew_ about him and _took notice_. Until things just _weren't secret from him anymore_, because everyone could see where he was going with his career, what he intended to _do_ with himself, and if he was going to make himself the backbone of greater Britain, there were certain things he needed to _know_.

And then, a certain file had crossed his desk, and he read it- _sparked_, and _connected_ it back to that fateful day so many years ago, that day with Melissa- read it all the way through and set aside _everything else_ he had on hand, postponed _everything_, and asked for a day's leave.

And he spent it traveling out to that poor woman's home in the countryside, where she had retired to, and when her grandchildren let him in, he went right up to her room and sat down by her bedside and _apologized_ right then and there, to a woman who was half-senile and a little bit deaf and mostly blind, because _Christ_. That _file_.

He had gone back the next day, and sat down, and asked his secretary to find him _every piece of information_ having to do with this _Doctor_ that she could possibly get her hands on.

She had nodded and told him she'd get right on it and walked out with the intention of mucking around and getting her hands dirty and calling in a few favors and then coming back and getting some good overtime pay that she could use to save up for that new Mercedes she had been looking at ever since it came off the production line.

She hadn't come back.

Ever.

Mycroft hadn't been able to find her. That had been the part of it that really _dug_ at him the most. He had _no idea_ what had happened to her. Alive or dead, captive or accomplice, _no idea_. She had just _vanished_. He tracked her as far as the front doors, and then _nothing_. Nothing on the cameras. No witnesses. Nothing.

Gone.

When his secretary had gone missing, Kinley- the head of his office- _in title only, he mostly left the duties of his position to Mycroft anyways, by unspoken agreement_- had stopped by and asked him the usual questions when a member of the government just _goes missing_. Kidnapped or a spy or just had a nervous breakdown from the stress and ran off to some beach in Hawaii.

And Mycroft had- _very honestly_- informed the man what the last thing he had asked the girl to do for him was. He told Kinley that he had asked her to find information on this one doctor.

Kinley had gone very quiet. Almost exactly like that poor woman so many years before.

He had walked out without a word.

And he didn't come back, either.

Gone. Off the face of the planet. Wiped off the _goddamn map_.

And when someone got around to asking Mycroft whether or not he had any idea what might have happened, why the head of their department was _missing and presumed dead_, he was smart enough to _keep his stupid mouth shut_ this time.

Mycroft was not a man easily taken by paranoid conspiracy. But this was becoming _a little too hard to pretend like it wasn't happening._ And in the back of his mind, he began worrying- _I just visited Mel right before I started this line of inquiry, are they going to think she's the reason why I started asking around? Oh no- no, please, I just wanted to tell her I was sorry, I didn't want to get her involved in this, I didn't want her to get mixed up in this mess, please-_

So he tremblingly picked up the phone and called Melissa's house out in the country, because he had _just taken a day off work_, and they wouldn't possibly let him have _another_ one so soon, not with all these eyes on him-

Melissa's now eight-year-old granddaughter answered the phone.

When he asked her if he could speak to her grandmother, little Genevieve asked, "Who?"

He cited a wrong number and hung up.

Then, he leaned back, buried his face in his hands, and wondered _what the hell he had just gotten himself into_.

When he managed to get one of his agents down there to check up on the family, he had returned with news that the parents and the kids were fine, but there was no sign of _any_ elderly ailing woman having _ever_ lived in that house.

When he sent the same agent back six weeks later, the house had been gone. Just _gone_. No children. None of Melissa's family had any evidence of ever having been there. The house had simply _ceased to exist_, just like everyone and everything else connected to this mess.

When his agent had called from a phonebooth across from _where their house used to be_, after a fruitless day of talking to neighbors who swore up and down that _that lot had always been vacant_, Mycroft had told him to get himself back to the main offices _as quickly as possibly managable_, and warned him to lay low and watch himself on the way back.

He never did.

Make it back, that was.

And one of Mycroft's best young agents had been vanished, just as _quickly_ and _effectively_ and _efficiently_ as all the rest of them, and Mycroft put in twice the extra security in his office, and told himself _it's perfectly rational to be paranoid when people connected to this are ceasing to exist left and right_.

Over the _next_ five years, Mycroft learned how to go about looking into the matter- that was to say, you _couldn't_ look into it directly. Anyone who spoke about it directly and stuck their nose where it didn't belong was _removed_, generally without any sort of muss or fuss, and they would just _not show up to work ever again_. But if you really wanted to know about it, it was an ongoing game throughout the upper-management offices. If you got your hands on information about this matter, what you did was _read it_, and then you left it in a folder on the edge of your desk where it could forseeably get knocked over by the visiting head of _another_ office, who could then catch a glimpse of its contents in order to know what was in it. The polite thing to do was then to come back later when that office was vacant and steal it, read it, and then do the _same_ thing to _someone else_, who would then come burglarize _your_ office later that week. No one ever mentioned the picked locks and the unlatched doorhandles and other, rather more _inventive_ methods used to gain access to those offices in the interim. It was generally in good taste not to mention any property damage at all.

Mycroft had no idea how long it had been since Diogenes club rules had started to apply to everyday life. Let alone in the _hallways_.

Over those next five years, ten since he had first held the original folder in his hands, he had learned _just enough_ about this open conspiracy- _just enough_ to know that he knew _way too much for his own good_.

The first, most foremost, _significant_ thing that he had learned was that the doctor wasn't just _some doctor_ that had been granted anonymity for the sake of the report.

He was the _Doctor_. Capital D.

The second thing, the most telling, the most _meaningful_ thing, was something he had deduced on his own, by piecing together the clues. The Doctor wasn't some xenobiologist with a rubbish degree from the university and a good eye for detail. He was an expert on aliens because _he was one_.

Simple online research of the google-search variety provided Mycroft with a far more vast depth of rumor to delve into. Apparently, there had been _dozens_ of 'Doctors' over the span of human history- all the way from the beginning, scrawled in the earliest known cave paintings, worshipped by way of statues in pompei as a household god, hinted at in Shakespere's works, written about in a few journal entries by survivors of the holocaust- one website even implied that there had been a Doctor present during the American president Kennedy's assassination, the sinking of the Titanic, the sacking of Rome- _anything_ that was ever _anything_ bad that happened _anytime, anywhere in the world_, there was always a Doctor present.

With the implication that they looked _just like Human beings_, Mycroft's paranoia became a tangible, sincere, pulsing _worry_. Because if this alien species had been there from the very beginning of civilization, ever-present, ever-watching, _shaping_ the course of Human history from the _start_, then they could be _everywhere_ right now. They could be _anyone_. Any person he spoke to might potentially be _a Doctor_, watching, listening, waiting for any hint that _Humans knew about their existence_ and then going and _vanishing_ the ones that _were_ so tactless as to make a mistake and let something slip.

He held that mistaken belief for nearly a _year_- one year of _nerve-wracking paranoia_, of a worry so heavy and _tense_ that he started going prematurely bald out of stress alone. A year of _keeping tabs on everyone else_ because if _they_ were watching _him_ to see if he slipped up, then _he_ was going to watch _them_ and see if _they_ slipped up first. He wanted to know _who around him_ was an alien in Human skin, and if they thought they were going to get him first, they were _sorely_ mistaken.

Ten and a half months later, he hadn't found even _one_. Not even a whisper of a Doctor. And he was beginning to wonder if either _they already knew he knew, and they were so good at keeping themselves hidden that __**he**__ hadn't even noticed_, or...

Or the unspeakable alternative, _what if he had lost his mind?_

This. This thing he was doing. It was rubbish, wasn't it? This was the sort of thing a madman did. Some lunatic, raving about _alien invasions_ and _abductions_ and he was getting so fantastically paranoid that it was beginning to affect his work ethic. He had barely gotten any excercise that whole year because the thought of leaving his office- his _sanctuary_, his place of refuge, the place he had bugged and boobytrapped and wired up eight different ways- had been so utterly _unthinkable_.

And he had been ready to give up, to tear his hair out in frustration, to just _drop it all_ and _sod it all_ and go ask an actual doctor- a _real_ doctor- for a psychiatric evaluation, and _damn_ the conscequences, when he had learned the third, new, _very important thing_ in the circulation of sparse information through the usual burglary network.

These people all around him that he had been so worried about he had nearly driven himself insane didn't exist. There were no _Doctors_ on the planet, aliens keeping tabs on them, keeping them quiet and placid. No, these masses of powerful opponents he had been expecting didn't exist.

No. He had learned something _else_ new, _vastly_ important, more than anything else he had learned thus far.

The D wasn't the _only_ capital letter in The Doctor's name.

It wasn't 'one of the Doctor people' or 'a Doctor' or 'Doctors'.

It was _The_. As in _singular_. One. Single. _Doctor_.

The Doctor.

The one and _only_ Doctor.

And he _breathed_, and relaxed for the first time in _not-quite-a-year_, and let himself just _bury his face in his hands_ and try not to hyperventilate in relief because _he wasn't mad_ and _the reason he hadn't found any aliens around him was because there __**hadn't**__ been any_ and _none of the people around you that you used to think you could trust are going to vanish you if they learn you know too much_.

That relief lasted all of ten seconds before _realization_ hit, and that stress and tension and worry all turned to _fear_.

One Doctor.

The Doctor.

As old as mankind itself, influence stretching out to the four corners of the Earth, a single being capable of passing himself off as Human, capable of passing himself off as _one of us_, but _how intelligent must a being like that be?_ Mycroft prided himself on being rather clever, but it was simple science to deduce that if a being _lived_ exponentially longer than Humans did, then their minds- their _brains_ would have to be _that degree better_ then those of normal Humans, if only to be able to hold and process the _memories_ of such a longer life. With the proclaimed title of _The Doctor_, it was hardly reasonable to suspect that this being wasn't _intelligent_, especially since he seemed to get called in to be consulted on particularly vexing problems, especially because he _had_ lived this long already, survived to the modern day despite all of the potential dangers and threats and hazards of living among Humans- anyone who had lived _this long_ already, without revealing himself to the planet at large, would have to be either _fiendishly_ smart or _terribly_ powerful.

But the thing that struck him- _shattered_ him, down to the core- was the thought that _he and Sherlock were above the Human average in terms of intelligence_, and both of _them_ considered themselves 'beyond the usual rules' because of it.

So if this Doctor was so much smarter than _that_, and _old_- old enough to have watched a thousand dynasties fall, old enough to have _heard_ all the "rules" before, only to see Humans breaking them left and right, and then evolving and developing out of them years later, only to institute _new_ rules that _work better_ than the old ones- if he had really lived through all of that... then how far out of the usual moral comfort zone would he operate within?

What would sound _reasonable_ to him, after a clever man lived long enough that simple Human lives were as transient and fragile as ants, and genocides were simply things that Humans did every generation or two?

What went on inside the head of a man who could be traced back to _every single catastrophic event throughout history?_

And how many of them had he _caused?_

Mycroft wouldn't be getting a very good sleep that night. Nor the next one.

In fact, from that day forth, even though he _could_ sleep- as opposed to before, when paranoia had gripped him so tightly as to throttle him into insomnia- now, whenever he dreamed, it was always the same dream. A dream about meeting somebody on the street, some simple, normal person, and shaking their hand, and it crumbling beneath his fingers until all the stranger's flesh had disintegrated and _Mycroft could see the darkness underneath_, that crawling chaos of shadows which had been crammed down into a Human body, _staring_ at him from a face that wasn't a face out of eyes that weren't really _eyes_, just _staring_ at him and waiting. Waiting in silence for him to run, so it could chase. Waiting for his next move, so he would come into range. Waiting for him to show himself, so it could add him to its bodycount and move on to the next interesting little Human that proved itself to be just a little cleverer than the rest.

And whenever he woke up after one of those dreams, he closed his eyes for a moment and _prayed_- actually, literally _prayed_, because even though he couldn't _prove_ the existence of God, he couldn't _disprove_ it either, and it hardly seemed reasonable to take all the _simple_ precautions against coming to harm while ignoring such an obvious one- just because you didn't think your house was going to burn down didn't mean you didn't buy fire insurance, after all- and even if the effort was simply wasted, then at least it was better to have been safe than sorry. And in those moments, when he prayed, he prayed that The Doctor would never find him, would never find his family, would never find _Sherlock_, because if Mycroft was a fun little snack for that nightmare, then Sherlock wouldn't stand a chance.

And maybe that wasn't what frightened him most.

Maybe what frightened him more was the thought that one day, that darkness would come, and it would look straight at Mycroft, and _through_ him into Sherlock, and decide he was a _curious little Human_. Curious enough to take away, like all the people over the years who had vanished, the ones who were never seen again.

And Mycroft would never see him again.

And never know what had happened to him.

He would never even find the body.

The surveilance measures surrounding Sherlock Holmes were born shortly afterward.


	4. Retention Failure

She'd had to sit down.

It was nothing too bad. Not at all like poor Mrs. Sullivan from down the road who'd fallen down the stairs, poor dear. Her hip just ached sometimes when she'd been putting too much weight on it.

Mrs. Hudson had been going shopping. She'd been out of tea, and hadn't intended to be gone for long- but as soon as she'd gotten to the market and picked up a basket, she'd realized that she was out of blueberries, too, and she needed some flour, and it simply wouldn't do to let herself run out of jam- and the next thing she knew, she'd had to put back the basket and grab a cart. And then there she was, walking back three blocks with five bags of groceries, and she'd only made it two of those blocks before her hip started doing her a disservice.

It was a silly thing, that hip of hers. Had been bothering her since she'd tripped running away from her dear old husband that time he'd had the rolling pin. It was alright- really, nothing to worry about- and so long as she took it easy, it really wasn't much of a bother at all.

At the moment, though, she felt _older_ than she had in a good long while.

"Oh, hello there. Almost didn't see you there. Are you alright?"

She glanced up at the speaker in surprise, a warmth rushing through her chest. Despite all that she'd been through- or maybe _because_ of it- she knew the world was a kind place, filled with helping hands and gentle smiles on every street corner, if only you knew where to look. Her boys didn't always see it that way, though- and she always felt so _sad_ for Sherlock, the poor dear, when he seemed blind to it.

This, though- a young man, a bit younger than her boys, with spiky brown hair and a long coat to protect him from the cold- goodness, but it was always nice to see a lad like this concerned for old daft folk like her.

"Oh, thank you, dearie- it's just my hip." she rubbed a hand over it, before turning back to him with a smile. "Taking a bit of a breather, is all, but bless you for asking."

"I could give you a hand, if you like." he gestured down at the bags, and she couldn't help the delight that etched itself over her face.

"Would you really, dear? It's just down the row, there- number 221, you know. I would ever so appreciate it."

He laughed, and picked up the bags- _four of them, the lad knew better than to offend her by taking all of them_- leaving her to carry the last one, a task her hip was _far_ more ready to agree to.

She rambled on to the young lad all down the street- about Mrs. Turner's allergies, about the weather, about tea, anything she could think of. She thought he was just humoring her, the sweet thing- but then he asked for clarification about one of her first cats, and they were chatting along like old friends, and he was really _listening_ to her like he was enraptured by what she was saying. She hadn't had someone really _pay attention_ to this since... well, she admitted to herself, since she was still a young spry thing. It was _nice_.

All too soon, they'd reached the doors, and she'd reluctantly taken back the bags, and found herself inviting the young man inside for tea. He'd laughed it off, and shook his head, and she blurted out,

"You've been lovely, dear. Thank you so much. For everything."

"Please, it was my pleasure. Do take care of yourself- and don't forget to take a load off of that hip, alright? Wouldn't want any other strange young men escorting you home, would we?"

And he'd winked, and she'd giggled like the schoolgirl that she'd once been, and watched as he walked away- and for the first time in weeks, she found herself practically _bouncing_ through the house with a great big beaming grin on her lips. She'd put away the groceries humming a little song to herself, and noticing which things she'd forgotten she already _had_ in the mad rush of shopping, and trying to organize them in the cupboards so that she'd use up the older one before opening the new one, and realized that she'd just _gotten_ flour, and there wasn't enough space, so she wound up baking cookies because _what on Earth else were you supposed to do when you had too much flour?_

She'd just pulled them out of the oven and set them on the counter to cool off when she heard the door open, and two pairs of feet in the hall, and the voices of her boys arguing with eachother like it what they were born to do rang through the building, and she rushed out with her big happy smile and offered them both cookies and it turned into asking them _why in the world_ they were tracking mud in on her nice clean floor and insisted they sit down and take their shoes off to be cleaned _this very instant_ and five minutes later they were both sitting at her kitchen table with a mug in one hand and a cookie in the other, and Sherlock was grumbling because apparently John had won some kind of concession from him, and John was sitting back looking content with himself, and Mrs. Hudson _knew_ that whatever they'd agreed to, there would be a bit of peace and quiet around the place for the next few days at least. Until Sherlock found some loophole and started up with causing a ruckus again, and John got into another tiff with him, and they'd make it all up over chinese takeout. Her boys. They thought she was a bit thick, she knew that, but for all the two lads were so smart they could be so _blind_, sometimes.

The front door bell rang, and John offered to get up to answer it because he was being a sweetheart and Sherlock must have seen her hip was acting up and told John somehow, without saying a word, because the two of them were too perfect to let their row get in the way of being her darlings. And the next thing she knew, the whole building was _flooded_ with men in suits and cops and Sherlock was yelling at someone outside and John had broken away from talking to some very short man with an oval face and was standing just in the doorway, glancing worriedly in at her. Something wrong, she supposed. Her boys, the two heroes, rushing about to save the day- it looked like half the police force was in her front hall. Had something very bad happened? It must have, to have so many people standing there with such pale faces, and more seemed to be arriving every moment.

And then she was being bustled outside, into a car- and _blimey_ there were a lot of cars and vans outside, nearly blocking off the whole _street!_- and she heard John try to explain to her that they'd be right behind her and not to be frightened, and she'd managed to tuck a few cookies into a napkin in her pocket in case she got peckish wherever they were taking her and the boys.

When they brought her out of the car and took her up an elevator to an office in a building that looked from the outside like it had been abandoned, she found herself sitting in a comfortable arm chair across from _Sherlock's brother_, of all people. The one who was always trying to curb his brother and tearing his hair out when it didn't work, the poor thing.

"Hello, Mycroft, dear." she smiled at him and pulled the napkin out of her pocket, offering him one of the cookies. "Made these earlier." she told him, secretively. "Snuck a few out before they could bustle me out of the house. Ginger biscuits. Would you like one?"

"No. Thank you, madam, but I'm on a diet." he managed a smile, that one that always struck her as one that didn't feel very happy at all, staring at the cookies in her hands as though she were offering him some kind of dead rat- "And while it pains me to have to ask you this, we have something a bit more... _serious_ to discuss."

"Yes?" she was beginning to get worried, now, because her boys usually did their best to keep her out of anything too _serious_ when it came to their work-

And he tilted his head to the side, and reached out, and pushed a folder across to her- and she opened it up, and inside-

"Tell me, Mrs. Hudson..." he began, quietly, as she stared down at a still security camera photo of _herself_, walking side by side with a young man with spiky brown hair and a long coat, both of them carrying shopping bags and laughing merrily at something she'd just said. From this photo, though, she realized what she'd been too carried away and caught up in the moment to see at the time it had been happening.

He had glanced up at the security camera in the exact moment this snapshot had been taken, staring at it with those brown eyes that had seemed so marvellously warm towards her, but from this angle they looked... she couldn't put a word to it. They looked...

Well.

They looked like how Sherlock's eyes looked when he worked himself up into a mood.

They looked like how her late husband's eyes had looked that day with the rolling pin.

They looked like how the eyes of every nightmare she ever had stared back at her.

And that marvelous smile that had lifted her spirits so much just looked _frightening,_ from this angle, from the bird's eye view staring down at the two of them. Down on the ground, with him, it had seemed so _warm and comfortable_. But looking down at it, for a split second she almost feared for the woman in the picture walking along with this stranger, before she remembered it was _herself_ and she was _fine_ and the stranger was a lovely young man who'd helped her carry her groceries home-

And she looked back up at Mycroft Holmes, and he was watching her like he was reading her mind and it wasn't at all the way that Sherlock did it, a little snappish but it meant he cared enough to pay attention to her none the less- in Mycroft's eyes, it was like she was a piece in a puzzle and nothing more.

"...tell me... about your new _friend_."


End file.
